The Visual Studio Tools for Office team has moved to http://blogs.msdn.com/vsto , and the RSS feed is http://blogs.msdn.com/vsto/rss.xml. We’ve got a lot more team members set up to blog over there so come on over and join us! Important Links: Office Development with Visual Studio Blog Office Development How Do I Videos Office Development Screencasts on…

Nathan Carlson developed a creative solution for Outlook 2007 using Visual Studio 2008 (codename Orcas). The Out Loud for Outlook project started as a dogfood testing project last summer. For those of you unfamiliar with the dogfood testing practice at Microsoft, it’s a term for testing our own products in real-world solutions while they are…

There’s recently been some confusing information circulating about the future of VBA in the press that we want to clear up. The report that the next generation of Office will not contain VBA is untrue – the next generation of the Microsoft Office system will definitely contain all of the functionality that developers and power…

If you created a project for Microsoft Office 2007 using Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2, you will probably see a number of broken assembly references if you open the project in the final release of Visual Studio 2008. This is because most of the assemblies in the version of the VSTO runtime that is used for Microsoft Office 2007 projects…

There is no way to show or hide an adjoining form region at run time. However, you can show and hide a custom task pane at run time. Therefore, if you need to give your users the ability to show and hide a UI panel in an Outlook item, consider using a custom task pane….

We are working on making the documentation better, but we need your help to do it right. We’d appreciate it if you could take 10 minutes to go to the Visual Studio Content Survey and let us know what you think.

Hi, my name is Kris Makey, I’m one of the Testers working on the VSTO team. Over the last year my area has been focused on testing the new Deployment features for “Orcas” Office 2007. It’s been a rather hectic year getting every to be just right. Hopefully what you (our customers) are seeing in…

An updated VSTO 2005 SE runtime (VSTOR.exe, build .891) is now publicly available for download at: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=4468D8CB-B43E-4B09-82F6-8BA3F7B5E935 This update contains a couple of bug fixes in the area of Outlook automation. It also contains a number of updates to support Visual Studio 2008. The Customer Support team is working on a KB describing more details…

The Common Language Runtime stores User security policy in a location based on the CLR version number. Updates to the Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 update the CLR version number when they are installed, which causes the CLR to check for policy in a different folder. Because the new folder contains default User security policy, any…

I’m hoping many of you are as excited as we are about the upcoming release of VSTO – shipping in Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition. In this release, we’ll have many new exciting features such as the ability to create custom Outlook form regions, support for ClickOne deployment, visual ribbon designer, VBA/VSTO interoperability, and much more….